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AI models cost a lot more to develop than you may think. AI research company Epoch AI has set out all the costs of building a new AI model — and explaining why AI companies are so concerned about perceived threats to their intellectual property.
It has looked into this before: Last year, it estimated that of OpenAI’s $5 billion expenditure on R&D, only about 10 percent went on the final training runs, with the majority going on scaling, synthetic data generation, and basic research.
At the time, Epoch was unsure whether this was a peculiarity of OpenAI but now two Chinese companies, MiniMax and Z.ai, have also disclosed their R&D compute spending, and Epoch has found that, despite the differences in company size, final training runs are only a small part of the Chinese companies’ R&D expenditure too.
